Earth has quietly lost its only weather satellite around Venus. On September 18, 2025, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency carried out the final shutdown of the Venus Climate Orbiter Akatsuki, formally ending a mission that spent more than eight years watching the atmosphere of our nearest planetary neighbor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Contact with the spacecraft had already been lost in late April 2024 after a problem in a lower-precision attitude control mode. Engineers tried for more than a year to reestablish communication, but the probe never answered again. Given the age of the craft and the fact that it had already worked far beyond its planned lifetime, mission managers decided it was time to close operations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Akatsuki was launched from Tanegashima Space Center <\/a>in May 2010 and finally slipped into orbit around Venus in December 2015, becoming Japan\u2019s first successful planetary orbiter beyond Earth. Its path to Venus orbit was anything but straightforward. A first attempt to brake into orbit in 2010 failed when the main engine was damaged, leaving the probe circling the Sun instead. Five years later, engineers used smaller attitude thrusters to perform a second, delicate braking maneuver and rescued the mission.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Once in its elongated orbit, swinging between roughly 1,000 and 360,000 kilometers above Venus, Akatsuki settled into a routine that any weather satellite operator on Earth would recognize. The spacecraft carried five cameras that observed the planet from ultraviolet to long-wave infrared<\/a>, <\/a>along with an ultra-stable oscillator used for radio science. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Together they mapped clouds, probed temperature and pressure profiles, and searched for lightning and hints of volcanic activity in the thick Venusian atmosphere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the mission\u2019s headline discoveries came only hours after orbit insertion. Akatsuki spotted a gigantic, bow-shaped atmospheric wave<\/a>, fixed over a mountainous region and stretching about 10,000 kilometers across the cloud tops. Researchers identified it as a stationary gravity wave, the largest such feature seen in the Solar System.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Later, the orbiter revealed a fast-moving equatorial jet in the lower and middle cloud<\/a> <\/a>layers, with wind speeds peaking near the planet\u2019s equator. Those results helped refine the picture of Venusian super rotation, where the atmosphere whips around the planet in just a few Earth days while the solid surface crawls through a single rotation in about 243 Earth days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Akatsuki also opened the door to a more Earth-like way of studying other planets<\/a>. Using cloud motion tracked by its ultraviolet imager, scientists applied data assimilation techniques that are standard in modern weather forecasting centers. The combined models and observations produced the first objective three-dimensional analyses of thermal tides in Venus\u2019 atmosphere, a key piece in understanding how super rotation is maintained.<\/p>\n\n\n\nRead More: Europe has just secured a new generation of satellites that will monitor emissions, ice, oceans, and crops like never before<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Akatsuki discoveries in Venus atmosphere<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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